Neighbors Anyone Would Want, And Most Wanted by F.B.I., Too

By JOHN KIFNER,

Published: December 9, 1994

PITTSBURGH, Dec. 8—
The man who called himself Greg Peters and the woman known as Jo Elliott went to some of their friends and neighbors a week ago, people they knew from cookouts, favors done and repaid, Halloween trick-or-treating with their children, and said there was something they had to tell them.

They were on the F.B.I.'s "10 Most Wanted List."

In reality, they were Claude Daniel Marks, 45, and Donna Jean Willmott, 44, who lived near each other in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. They had been in hiding for nine years from Federal charges that they were part of a plot to blow up the maximum security prison in Leavenworth, Kan., land a helicopter in the confusion and spring a leader of a Puerto Rican nationalist group known as the F.A.L.N.

Neighbors on two quiet middle-class streets of Squirrel Hill have been stunned by the news that the people they knew as doting parents, helpful friends and community volunteers had turned themselves in on Tuesday to the Federal authorities in Chicago after nearly a year of negotiations, hoping to win reduced sentences. Some neighbors have been writing letters in their support.

"We were stunned, totally," said Janine Stern, when Mr. Marks told her and her husband. "It was very difficult to digest."

"We wondered what could be so serious," said Mrs. Stern, an artist who lived across the street from the modest house at 2309 Sherbrook Street where Mr. Marks lived with his wife, Diana Block, known here as Pat Hoffman, and their children, Tony, 9, and Leila, 3. "Then he just started telling us, 'I've been on the run, living under an assumed name.'

"We were weighed down by the news. It was almost a dream, something you would read or see in a movie. When I looked at him, he was still the Greg that I knew, not this Claude Marks."

"How often do you live next to someone on the '10 Most Wanted List?' " she said. "You picture someone shady looking, like some people in this neighborhood. But there weren't bearded people or anything going into his home, having long meetings. They spent a lot of time at home with their kids."

Fred Orlansky and Liz Evans were stunned, too. They live a few doors up from the apartment Donna Willmott rented at 914 Kennebec Street with her husband, Robert McBride, known here as Tim Anderson, and their daughter, Zoe, who just turned 4.

"They were very nice neighbors, caring and compassionate," said Mr. Orlansky, who said the couple counted themselves the family's best friends on the street. "If you picked anyone on the street you would think was a former terrorist, they'd be right at the bottom of the list."

Liz Evans remembered how the woman she knew as Jo Elliott fixed her chicken noodle soup when she was sick the night Mr. Orlansky's father died, recalling "she stayed the whole time, she fed me, held my hand, she was there." The woman's life, Mrs. Evans said, seemed to revolve around her daughter, Zoe, with trips to the museum and a swing in the backyard, but she never failed to ask about the health of their aged, nearly blind dog, Rennie.

But the neighbors remembered a petite red-haired woman who answered phones at the AIDS information hot line and organized holiday parties and outings for families of AIDS-infected and H.I.V.-positive children and was named this summer as an outstanding volunteer.

"Jo Elliott -- I'll continue to call her that -- did a lot of good here," said Mike Neal, head of the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force. "Donna Willmott I don't know."

On Sherbrook Street, where he had lived for seven years, the man known as Greg Peters was remembered for helping coach Little League baseball, for attracting crowds of children playing in the streets and yards, and for giving the tomatoes he grew to a nearby residence for the mentally impaired.

Laid off from his job two years ago in a video production laboratory, he was finding part-time work in construction for local contractors, and he donated many hours videotaping and editing for a literacy project for inner-city children.

The Government says the two former fugitives were members of the Weather Underground, the violence-prone schism of the radical Students for a Democratic Society at the end of the 1960's. They are charged with buying and transporting explosives in 1985 as part of a plot to help a convicted Puerto Rican terrorist, Oscar Lopez, break out of jail.

Mr. Lopez was the Chicago area leader of the F.A.L.N., a Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation. Federal prosecutors say the group is linked to 100 planned or actual bombings in its campaign for independence for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, resulting in 8 deaths and more than 100 injuries.

Captured making an illegal left turn near Chicago, Mr. Lopez was tried, convicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison on sedition charges.

While in Leavenworth, Mr. Lopez was charged, convicted again and sentenced to 15 more years on the escape charges involving the reported bomb and helicopter plot.

F.B.I. affidavits charge that Mr. Marks, a fugitive by the time of the trial for the escape plot, had committed the major overt act in the conspiracy by buying phony explosives from an undercover F.B.I. agent in Louisiana. He and Ms. Willmott, it is charged, discovered an F.B.I. bug on their rented car. They fled from California with their respective future spouses and eventually wound up here.

The two are now in Federal custody in Chicago, where they had moved with their families. A number of people here have begun writing letters seeking clemency to a Federal district judge, William T. Hart, who is to hold a hearing on the case on Tuesday. A letter from two friends, , the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Sally Kalson and her husband, Edward J. Feinstein, a lawyer, spoke of Ms. Willmott's determination to help others, even though she was herself a fugitive.

"Considering her situation, she might well have kept to herself all this time," the letter said. "Instead, she reached out to families in crisis and gave them support and hope where no one else could or would."

Another letter supporting Ms. Willmott came from Carol Lukoff, a clinical social worker with the Children's AIDS Project, who said, "I will never be able to replace Donna with another volunteer who can match her passion, devotion, intelligence and boundless energy."

Mr. Marks's friend and neighbor Mrs. Stern, the director of the Literacy Project on which he worked, wrote: "There are some people you meet in life and you truly feel that it is a lifetime friendship. Greg Peters is one of those people to me."